That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

“There is an unnerving tension at the core of That Used to Be Us,” said David Frum in The New York Times. In their “enlightened and enlightening” new diagnosis of what ails America, columnist Thomas L. Friedman and foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum trot out a long list of innovative CEOs and consensus-seeking politicians whose example suggests that all hope is not lost. Yet the authors also undercut their cheerleading with sobering facts. Some 75 percent of military-age Americans, we learn, are now unqualified to enlist because they either haven’t finished high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit. The top 1 percent of Americans, meanwhile, takes in roughly a quarter of all annual income—double its share of 25 years ago.

The authors do their best to brush past the gloom with an annoyingly willed optimism, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. “They’re like a doctor who says you have Stage 4 cancer and then adds brightly, ‘Think of it as an opportunity!’” But after they’ve made a convincing case that America’s foremost challenges are to respond energetically to global economic competition, slash debt and deficits, and wean itself off fossil fuels, it’s the feebleness of their solutions that disappoints most. Higher taxes? More education spending? A third-party presidential candidate who speaks for the “radical center”? “Good luck with that.”

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Yet there’s a deeper problem, said John Gray in the Financial Times. While these authors urge the U.S. to reclaim its position as the globe’s model economy, “the world has already moved on.” Globalization had produced “new varieties of capitalism, some more successful than the American version.” Even if Washington were fixed by a radical rewrite of the U.S. Constitution, the best that could be hoped for would be a more gradual national decline. Americans still seem to believe that “the rise and fall of nations is something that happens to other people.” They’re wrong.